'Assistant+' is a New Add-on for Siri So That She Can Say/Do Nearly Anything You Want

Siri, the all-knowing voice assistant for iOS devices, can be helpful; at times though, she is quite unhelpful. This is because Siri is limited to what she can do by the software engineers working for the big company over in Cupertino, California.

A new jailbreak tweak, on the other hand, called Assistant+ by iOS developer Zaid Elkurdi is now available in Cydia's BigBoss repository and brings a whole bunch of possibilities to the realm of Siri functionality. With it, you can empower Siri with new responses, and even tie her listening skills into functioning Activator listeners.

Above, you will see an example of a custom response we created. You can create any custom responses that you want with Assistant+, but in our case, we got sick of the snide remarks Apple has programmed Siri to say when you ask her if she wants to be jailbroken and we created our own response, just to rub it in their faces!

But, that's a small chip in the windshield of what Assistant+ can do, so here we'll take you through the tweak's application interface, which is added to the Home Screen after you install Assistant+:

Under the Activator Listeners field, you can create Activator listeners that make it so when you can assign Activator actions to asking Siri about specific things. For example, you can activate Car Mode, toggle Wi-Fi, toggle personal hotspot, and much more simply by using Activator actions that have been tied to a specific phrase that you query Siri with.

Under the Custom Replies field, you can set up specific queries that, when asked, will lead to a custom reply. This is a fun feature for showing off to friends and family, and while it won't be very useful for anything, it's mostly for entertainment purposes.

The Installed Plugins field is where things get interesting. Assistant+ is actually a platform that third-party developers can use to create additional Siri plugins so that she can do more. The Custom Replies add-on is actually an add-on the developer included himself for demonstration purposes, but you can also download more from Cydia if they're available. As you can see, we just downloaded SpotifySiriControls, which is another add-on that allows us to control Spotify with voice commands.

Once you've created Activator Listeners that you're interested in configuring, you can go to the Activator application on your Home Screen and select an action that you want to assign to the Activator listener you created:

Using Assistant+ is incredibly fun and gives you limitless opportunities for extending the functionality of Siri on your device. If you're interested in giving it a try, Assistant+ is available for $1.99 in Cydia's BigBoss repository right now. iOS 8 is required to install and use Assistant+.

If you are a developer and want to look into making an add-on for this package, the developer has published his API for using Assistant+ as a platform on GitHub at this link.